


Like a Disguise

by thisprettywren



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, Community: thegameison_sh, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:45:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisprettywren/pseuds/thisprettywren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes John can't help at all. Sometimes, what he can do is just enough. (Spoilers for S2 eps 1 &2)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Disguise

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [Lishan](gelishan.livejournal.com), [Mazarin](mazarin221.livejournal.com), [Sparrow](a_sparrows_fall.livejournal.com), and [stripedteacups](stripedteacups.livejournal.com) for prodding this into some kind of shape. Any remaining errors are 100% my own.

John attends his medical school graduation with a bruise on his hip the size of an orange, the remnant of a particularly active scrum the previous afternoon. When he sits back in his seat after receiving his diploma-- _Doctor_ Watson; it doesn't even sound unfamiliar, not anymore--he has to grit his teeth. First against the pain; then against a grin.

*

John finds a place for himself in the army. It isn't the other medics he connects with--they're good enough sorts but too like the students he remembers from school, not understanding why John turned down study groups and spent the time on the rugby pitch instead--but the infantry. They're boys, really, all of them too young for this, the endless sun baking squint lines into the skin around their eyes. They weren't allowed personal effects in boot camp and they've carried that ethos with them on deployment; wear their faces like armour, as tightly controlled as the laces in their boots, as impersonal as their camp beds.

Enough of them drop their act in John's presence that he lets himself smile at them, lets himself believe he's helping. On quiet days he bandages their blisters; on unquiet days he applies tourniquets, runs alongside gurneys, shouts orders. When that isn't enough he holds hands and passes along last words.

The days--both quiet and unquiet--pass into night, and he sleeps well.

*

It isn't until he finds himself flat on his back in a hospital bed that he sees just how useless it all is, the doctors and nurses smiling and smiling and thinking they're helping.

After that, he starts having nightmares.

It's almost a relief to be invalided. He isn't sure he'd have been able to go back, anyway, now that he knows.

*

John is back in London before he can force himself to really look at the mark on his shoulder--tight and shiny, inlaid like a carving in sculpture; irrevocably wrong--and he understands just how misguided he'd been, to suppose any of it had meant anything.

He touches the fingers of his right hand to the fresh pink skin of the developing scar, explores the even line of dots left by the stitches and staples. He'd been unconscious for those, of course, had failed to witness the tiny injuries demanded by the greater one, but his body remembers.

John sees himself transformed from a healer to a living memorial, his own flesh made witness to all of them, all the lives saved and lost.

(Or, too often: saved and _then_ \--)

He never saves a life. Not really; none of them walk away with that.

(A heartbeat, yes, but not--)

He presses his fingers harder against the delicate new tissue in his shoulder, digs his nails deep enough to hurt, to feel the faint throb of his pulse beneath the skin. _This is all any of them ever leave with_ , he thinks. It's a reduction so simple it's almost elegant and, in a way, he's glad.

If he knows he can't leave it behind, maybe he won't try.

*

Sometime later John is looking down at the body of a woman dressed in pink, kneeling across from a madman with a smile that seems to twitch across the surface of his skin. Then Sherlock looks at him with eyes that seem to see all the way down to John's bones, and they run and run until they collapse in a laugh that shakes John even deeper than that.

When Sherlock brings up the bullet it isn't quite a question, and John answers without a moment's hesitation. Because he's already moved his things; because he's just killed a man; because he's hungry; because he thinks, for the first time in a long time, that this is going to be _fun_.

*

He's known Sherlock for eight months on the night he loses him (then finds, loses, and finds him again).

*

Then there are Americans with guns and the woman with the riding crop, and when John sees Sherlock on the floor his face is slack, pale, marked with angry red welts. And John's angry, angry enough to damage, but it's all so ridiculous he just lets her walk away.

Back at home John rubs cream into the marks, even knowing it won't do much good, because he knows Sherlock wouldn't allow him to do even that much, were he awake. And he's both right and wrong, so far as it goes; the marks are still livid when Sherlock awakens, but he calls John's name and allows himself to be put back to bed and that, at least, is something.

*

Then there's the drugged coffee (oh, he should have known) and the lab and John is angry but, more than that, he's tired. Sherlock is watching his face and being so very _obvious_ but what John hears is his voice in memory: "Can you walk?"

And he's not okay with being an experiment, not at all, but Sherlock had known what he was doing, he'd _seen_ it; had turned those pale eyes on him and asked, not about his shouder--not even his hand--but about his leg. Sherlock may not understand sentiment, but this--

Well.

The truth is, his shoulder _doesn't_ hurt. John's never much seen the point in sentiment, anyway.

*

By the night Sherlock falls, the scar in John's shoulder has faded to white, though it still grows purple in the cold.

It would have been purple that night, he supposes, if he'd bothered to look. Instead he kneels on the harsh pavement in the January wind, calling Sherlock's name again and again. But it isn't John's wound so it's Sherlock's shirt that he wrenches open. He tears off his own jacket and presses it against the place where the knife had been and gone, trying to stop the bleeding.

It helps, but Sherlock is still bleeding even after his pulse fades, when the skin stretched tight across the space for his heart falls still.

John does the only thing he can; forms his hands into fists and physically beats the life back into that pale body, pressure against Sherlock's sternum that will crack ribs and leave bruises, and the hell of it is, it works.

*

Later, after the sirens and the ambulance and running alongside the gurney, after Sherlock is taken into surgery and John gives an official statement in the hallway, after a nurse pulls him into the loo and makes him wash Sherlock's blood from his face and neck, John is finally admitted back into the recovery room.

The air smells wrong, as harsh as the fluorescent lights overhead which reveal the creeping stain of a bruise blooming from below the collar of Sherlock's gown. John had been the one to put that there; had been the one to stain him under his pale skin. Like iodine; chemical invasion revealing the presence of something that shouldn't be there.

(And the hell of it is--)

Sherlock is pale and bandaged and breathing, and if this is all they're going to leave with, it's enough.

John folds himself into the visitor's chair, the movement making him aware of the ache in his chest and arms and back, his muscles' belated protest at being asked to do the work of keeping two hearts beating.

This time, John doesn't bother to swallow his grin.


End file.
